Limbo
by Diglossia
Summary: When Suoh Mikoto destroyed the Colorless King, he took Adolf K. Weismann with him. There's just one problem: the invulnerable can't die.


If Weismann had known what the Dresden Slate would do, if he had really _known_, he would never have let the Lieutenant take it to Japan. He had been so ignorant of the real world, so caught up in the propaganda, the rhetoric, the idea that he was helping make a happier world that he didn't stop to think how his purposes might be perverted, what the real objective behind his research might be. He had never liked to dwell on negative things.

In the wake of the city's destruction, not even knowing what being chosen meant for more complicated organisms, with his beloved sister gone, Weismann had let the Lieutenant take it and had disappeared into the Himmelreich. He stayed there, in his magnificent palace of isolation, ignoring the changes, the disasters, the absolute destruction the Slate had wrought on Japan's land and country.

He had to credit the Lieutenant with pulling those affected together and regulating those who didn't want to be constrained. The power the Slate awoke in people and animals was often immense and dangerous. It wasn't long before the power was abused.

Even he, in his isolation, noticed the Damocles Down that created the Kagutsu Crater. He should have gone down, but what was there to do? How many had died in Dresden, in London, in Hiroshima? Humans were destructive and had always been.

Isolation had turned Weismann cynical.

Neko, in placing false memories inside his mind, had given him an unforeseen gift: in the space of seconds, he, the greatest hikikomori of all, became intimately familiar with the modern world. Isana Yashiro knew this new world with its island schools and cleaning robots, had even heard distantly of Kings and Strains. Isana Yashiro wasn't afraid. When Weismann remembered who he was, it was simple to integrate the new world with the old. The world only changed so much.

The Red Clan was formidable, even more so because Weismann remembered the affected mice, those strangely powerful _Mus musculus_, that had been nothing in comparison to the young men trying to kill him. There was nothing in Weismann's data to suggest that each incarnation would be so phenomenally stronger than the last. And he had seen, albeit from high above, the Kagutsu Crater.

The Blue King was unquestionably fascinating. Laboratory mice could show violence and passion, but not calculated intelligence. There was no denying the Blue King was as calculated and controlled as a master shougi player, the sort of man who would be far more dangerous if left without a good cause. Weismann supposed killing a deranged spirit counted as a good cause.

What did the Lieutenant make of this new world? Weismann had the feeling he was its orchestrator, not that sweet Neko or dear Kuroh knew. It would be nice to think seventy years hadn't changed the man, but, even if that were true, the Slate's influence surely had done something. Look how different the world was.

Had he made it a happier place? People were still dying. People always died. Children were still being abandoned. Had that always happened? Weismann had been so oblivious to the outside. Ha. Maybe his isolation had started long before he stepped onto a blimp named Heaven.

Now he was in limbo instead and wasn't that much more fitting for a man who couldn't die, couldn't even age?

Limbo was incredibly depressing. There was no one to talk to, nothing to distract him from all of his mistakes. Suoh had succeeded in destroying the Colorless King and their shared-stolen body. Weismann was the first known Silver subject and the Colorless King the first of his kind, meaning there wasn't the data available for Weismann to be sure; however if: 1) the Silver King was invulnerable; 2) the Colorless King had used his abilities to switch Weismann's body with that of an unknown; and 3) Weismann manifested the Silver King's Sword of Damocles in the unknown's body, then it could be assumed Weismann was not, in fact, dead. He was in physical limbo, not metaphysical _Limbo_.

He could leave. Somehow. He'd find a way. He had to. Because if there was one thought Weismann kept coming back to, the existential question of his semi-existence, it was this: had he made the world a happier place?

Weismann didn't think so, and that was why he had to go back.


End file.
